Reading books, magazines and printed materials is an essential part of our lives. Turning pages of a book or magazine can be cumbersome for avid readers and particularly difficult for disabled individuals. A page turner can serve as an assistive technology for people with disabilities and the elderly, who may have limited upper extremity function. A page turner can also furnish hands-free operation to musicians, and provide avid readers with convenient book holder and page turning features.
While there are many prior art automatic page turners, virtually none of them are successful working products. This is due to the fact that all of such prior art devices lack one or two of the three major functions of a successful page turner: engagement with the page, transport of the page, and restraining the book pages to lie flat. The prior art is replete with designs that are too bulky, noisy, or unreliable.
One example of the prior art is U.S. Pat. No. 7,238,872 B1 to Edwards et al., in which pages are loaded into the spaces between bars on a movable rack. One page is turned at a time by moving (translating) the rack across the book. As a bar makes its way from one side of the book to the other, the page alongside that bar is pushed across, thereby turning the page. The problem with this approach is that the bar must travel a relatively large distance from one side of the book to the other in order to turn a page. This forces the bars to be spaced farther apart for more reliable page turning operation. A bar may have to travel approximately one inch beyond the center (spine) of the book before a page is flipped across. For unidirectional operation, this distance corresponds to the spacing between the bars.
Bidirectional operation would be preferable. In that case, the bars must be situated symmetrically about the center of the book. Therefore, that one-inch movement corresponds to a travel distance of two inches for a bar (one inch to get to the center and one inch to move past the center). A book having pages that are 8.5″ wide can only have four pages threaded between bars for reliable bidirectional page turning operation. Consequently, fewer bars can be packed together on the rack, limiting the number of pages that the rack can turn. In addition, the rack bars do nothing to secure the pages to lie flat while the book is opened.
What is needed is a page turner that is compact, silent, portable, reliable, and can be easily retrofitted to a wide range of bound printed matter, e.g., books and magazines.